22/7 ♡ Marinade Finance
Marinade Finance has established itself as one of the premier staking solutions in the Solana ecosystem, combining deep technical innovation with accelerating institutional adoption.
Market Leadership Through Innovation
Staking is core to crypto infrastructure: it secures networks while generating yield for participants. Adoption is accelerating across ecosystems - more than 29% of ETH is staked, with two-thirds of that liquid; on Solana, over 76% of circulating supply is staked, with around 10% liquid staked.
Since launching the first liquid staking solution (mSOL) in 2021, Marinade has steadily evolved. Its flagship product today is the Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM) which routes stake via an open validator auction - a model akin to Google Ads bidding. According to Messari, roughly 65% of all staked SOL (267M SOL) flows through the SAM marketplace which, in our eyes, is a remarkable feat often overlooked by the market.
Native Non-Custodial Staking
Marinade Native (v2) is the only fully native, non-custodial staking solution on Solana, removing custody risks while giving institutions direct control of their SOL. Thanks to Solana’s unique architecture of separating withdrawal and stake authorities, Marinade enables funds, custodians and ETF issuers to stake directly while retaining full control of assets. This innovation has quickly gained traction: Marinade Native alone has surpassed $1B in total value locked (TVL), and across all products Marinade now commands more than $2.4bn in TVL.
Institutional Momentum
Institutional adoption is ramping. Marinade partnered with Bitwise for its Solana Staking ETP, and in May 2025, Canary filed for the first U.S. Solana ETF with staking via Marinade Finance. These partnerships strongly position Marinade as the default choice for ETF-based SOL staking.
DAO and Tokenomics Overhaul
Until recently, $MNDE functioned primarily as a governance token, that changed however with proposals MIP-11 and MIP-13 where following proposals got accepted by the DAO.
50% of protocol fees are now used to buy back $MNDE on the open market (since Sept 2025).
30% of supply (~$40M) was permanently burned to reduce FDV overhang.
These changes transformed $MNDE into a token aligned with both “revenue” and “ETF” narratives, creating a powerful flywheel where ETF adoption directly drives buy pressure on the token.
Valuation Gap vs. Competitors
According to DefiLlama, Marinade is already outperforming Jito on revenue despite managing less TVL. Marinade currently generates revneues of $13M per year versus Jito’s $12M, a sign of greater efficiency and stronger monetization of its stake flows. This is a meaningful signal because it shows Marinade can compete head-to-head with the market leader on fundamentals, even before accounting for its accelerating institutional adoption and innovations like Marinade Native.
Even more striking is the valuation gap between the two. Jito commands a fully diluted valuation of $1.8B, while Marinade sits at just $114M. Relative to TVL, Jito trades at a 0.53 FDV/TVL ratio, compared with Marinade’s 0.05 more than a 10x difference. In other words, Marinade is producing equal or greater revenue at a fraction of the valuation. For investors, this represents a rare asymmetric bet: if the market begins to price Marinade in line with peers, the upside could be significant.
Why We Invested
We see Marinade as a rare asymmetric bet on the Solana ecosystem. In our view, all the right ingredients are coming together making Marinade one of the most compelling opportunities in the Solana ecosystem today.
Talented OG team with a track record of execution.
Superior technology, from SAM to non-custodial staking.
Accelerating institutional adoption, with ETF and ETP integrations.
Objectively undervalued tokenomics, with buybacks, burns, and catalysts like Solana ETFs and the upcoming Firedancer upgrade.